New Digital Publishing Suite Features Drive Usability and Heighten Business Opportunities

We are excited to announce the latest features designed for Digital Publishing Suite users. These updates are designed to help drive in-app sales and provide interactive capabilities for enhancing the immersive reading experience.

BUSINESS FEATURESAnalytics Dashboard Includes HTML5 Documents
Understanding what content is most popular and how long your readers are accessing it is important in driving content strategy. Thus far, you have been able to capture analytics for .folio files that include PNG, JPEG, and PDF content and view integrated metrics in the dashboard. However, most advertisements are delivered with HTML. Now you can track analytics associated with HTML content consumed on iOS and Android devices and integrate the metrics into your existing analytics package. This is especially helpful to publishers that want to track analytics on advertisements built with HTML so that the advertisers know how often the page has been viewed by readers. Contact your representative to learn how to set this up.

Restricted Distribution for Paid Folios (Enterprise Edition Only)
Last release, we provided restricted distribution for free .folios in order to deliver unique content to a select group of people based on customer profile or log-in credentials. You may recall that sales organizations use this feature so that a salesperson only sees relevant and needed content without the clutter of extraneous information. For example, a salesperson may only need .folios designed for his geography and specialty.

Membership organizations also use restricted distribution, but need to include retail .folios in the app. For example, most medical associations have a public facing journal that is free for members and costs a fee for the general public. Most associations want to provide exclusive content to their members, not visible by the public, in addition to the core publication. Once a member has signed in with her log-in credentials, restricted distribution allows the membership organization to “turn on” or provide member-only .folios. Now that Digital Publishing Suite supports restricted distribution of paid .folios, membership organizations can do the following within the same app:

1) Sell the journal to the general public
2) Provide members free access to the journal
3) Deliver exclusive content to members within the same viewer – without being viewed by the general public

When a customer signs in to the viewer, an entitlement server determines which .folios are available for download and/or purchase based on account type. Publishers do not need to use a custom HTML store to make retail .folios available.

END USER FEATURESBookmarking

Within Content Viewer, readers can now bookmark an article in a .folio on their iOS and Android devices in order to reference the article at a later time. Consumers will be able to add bookmarks to articles, jump to the bookmarked article, and then delete the bookmarks when they are done. The publisher can enable bookmarking capabilities by selecting “Bookmarks enabled” in Viewer Builder.

Auto-Archive Folios

In order to open up memory on readers’ tablets, we have created the ability to auto-archive .folios in the app library. Within Viewer Builder, publishers can set a limit on the number of .folios that are immediately viewable in the library. Because readers often download a mix of back issues and recent releases, auto-archiving is based on the date that the reader downloaded the .folio, and not on the publication date. Consumers who choose to opt into auto-archiving will find that, if they exceed the limit set by the publisher as they download a new issue, the .folio that has been downloaded for the longest period of time will be automatically archived to the cloud.

Watch the video below. You will notice that, if the reader chooses to restore purchase, he can still re-download archived folios. Because there is a fixed limit to the number of .folios in the library, the next .folio in the hierarchy will be automatically archived. Learn how to set up auto-archiving at Bob Bringhurst’s Digital Publishing Suite help site.

Navigation Bar Expanded (Enterprise only)

The navigation bar at the bottom of the content viewer now supports eight slots that can be all be customized for your readers’ needs.

DESIGN AND INTERACTIVITYSmooth Scrolling Layouts

Prior to this release, if you wanted to create a smooth scrolling layout, it would recognize both layouts as landscape because its height was always longer than its width. Today Folio Builder recognizes (for example) 1024×2000 as a landscape smooth scrolling layout, and 768×2000 as a portrait smooth scrolling layout. Visit Bob Bringhurst’s help site to learn how to set up smooth scrolling.

Scrollable Frames
Currently, to create scrollable frames publishers have been using the “Pan Only” feature in the Pan & Zoom overlay type as a work around. Now, there is a new panel section that is specifically designed for scrollable frames, and it allows designers to hide the scroll bar. The Adobe team has provided more flexibility for positioning content in the scrollable frame. Up until this point, content placed in the scrollable frame defaulted to the top left corner. Now, designers can choose where the starting point is, which is beneficial for content that needs to be read or seen from right to left, such as Japanese writing. It also allows designers to create an image that slides from the left side of the screen to the right, or from the top of the screen to the bottom. And yes, you can start the scrolling frame from the middle, too.

Watch the video below, which provides examples of:

1) Scrolling from right to left
2) Scrolling left to right
3) Scrolling from the middle, moving right, left, up and down

Linking Articles to Custom Store (Enterprise Only)
Upselling and cross-selling content within the app is essential for driving new revenue streams with publishers’ existing customer base. Digital Publishing Suite enables linking from within an article to the custom HTML store within the app. If you have an article that mentions a special edition (e.g. National Geographic’s 50 Best Photographs or Backpacker’s Gear Guide) the reader can follow a link to the HTML store where she could purchase the special edition immediately.

DEVICE SUPPORTThe new iPad

Configuring for iPad 1, iPad 2, and the new iPad in Viewer Builder

The new iPad comes out on March 16th! Digital Publishing Suite will enable publishers and content creators to build high resolution applications that take full advantage of the new A5X processer, support for 1080p video output and more intensive pixel density. The new iPad screen has twice the resolution of iPad 1 and 2. Publishers can immediately begin testing and previewing content for the new iPad using the generic Content Viewer. Stay tuned for more information on new iPad design best practices.

Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Team

Comments

By Mike - 10:21 AM on March 23, 2012

As it seems the new Adobe Content Viewer that’s required for testing projects created with this version isn’t available yet. Wouldn’t it make sense to synchronize the release?
The old viewer is already getting bad reviews on the Apple app store because of this.

You basically can’t view anything you created with the latest DPS tools. Is Apple to blame?